Steffi Magub
Steffi recently completed her PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Kent at Canterbury, and now works for Creative Lynx - a marketing and advertising company which works with a number of life sciences, healthcare and pharma companies. Her PhD thesis involved surveying the expression of EGF receptors and ligands in healthy and cancerous canine tissues and also determining the role of the HER2 receptor canine mammary cancer. Prior to her PhD, Steffi completed her BSc in Forensic Biology in 2008, where she carried out a research project exploring NRG3 expression in rat tissues. Steffi has been heavily involved with science communication, both through outreach activities to schools and the general public, and also through official presentations to pharmaceutical companies and academia. Steffi was a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Networking (STEMNet) Ambassador to the South-East of England from 2008 to 2011.
Articles by Steffi Magub:
Immunohistochemistry: Getting The Stain You Want
Immunohistochemistry (IHC) is a vital tool, not just at your wet bench but also in clinical labs the world over. IHC is used extensively in hospitals and veterinary practices in grading and studying cancers, and the results may determine what treatment a patient gets – including the controversial Herceptin! But it’s also pretty useful in…
How To Make Your Own ECL
ECL can be an expensive reagent in a lab, and what with it being involved in the final stage of a western blot, it’s something you don’t want to have to worry about too much. During my PhD, I was struggling with my western blots for ages – it seemed I was doing everything right,…
Scientists Work Too Much – Is this Bad for Science?
In my time in the lab, I came across people with lots of different work ethics. The lazy scientists, the let-everybody-else-do-all-the-hard-work-for-me scientists, the strictly-nine-to-five scientists, the nocturnal scientists, the always-on-holiday scientists and, of course, the workaholic scientists. Science is no easy trade. It’s time consuming, and the pressure to get results can be huge. It’s…
Top Ten Tips for Making Stock Solutions
Having to make stock solutions is a part of everyday lab life…a tedious, but necessary, one. So why not make the process as streamlined as possible? Here are a few little tricks I picked up while I was still in the lab: Check to see if anybody has a tried and tested recipe – why…
Book Review: “The Demon in the Freezer”, by Richard Preston
Before reading “The Demon in the Freezer”, I was rather ignorant about bioterrorism. The only instance of it that sprung to mind was the anthrax attacks on the United States shortly after 9/11. After reading Richard Preston’s book, I wish I was still as ignorant as I once was! Allow me to explain. Preston’s book…
Advice To An Earlier Me, On The Occasion Of My Graduation
I recently had my PhD viva (that’s a thesis defense, to those of you in the US, and it was successful – yay!), and one of the questions my examiners brought up was: “if you could go back and do things differently, what would they be?”. Obviously they were thinking more about what different reagents,…
Book Review: the PhD Comics Strip Collection series
Everyone who’s doing a PhD knows the emotional turmoil you go through. Who among us hasn’t felt the following?: a) Anxiety? b) Depression? c) An inability to relax? d) Frustration at your equipment/experiments/supervisor/idiot student you’re mentoring who used up all the expensive antibody? e) All of the above… f) …and more? Well I certainly felt…
How To Make Your Own ECL
ECL can be an expensive reagent in a lab, and what with it being involved in the final stage of a western blot, it’s something you don’t want to have to worry about too much. During my PhD, I was struggling with my western blots for ages – it seemed I was doing everything right,…
How to Care for Your pH Meter
Is there anything more tedious than pH-ing a solution? Standing there adjusting the pH of your buffer, adding acid or alkali drop by drop until you get to the right pH… With pH-ing being so boring, it’s in our best interests to keep the equipment in good working order so that we needn’t fuss over…
How to Survive a Poster Session
Poster sessions can be your best friend, or your worst nightmare; it all comes down to how well you’ve prepared. In this article, I’ll discuss how to present your data in poster form, what to look out for at a poster session, and how to make the most out of a poster session…in short, how…
Setting up a PubMed Alert in 3 Easy Steps
We all know what a pain reading is. It’s what we start our PhDs doing, and from that point on we never stop doing it. Keeping up-to-date with current research in our field is vital: you don’t want to be going down one route with your research, only to find that it’s already been done…
Build a CV You Can Be Proud Of: Part IV – Managing Time, Planning, and Staying Sane in the Lab
Following on from the previous article on Developing your Analytical Skills, this article will be the last in this series and looks at how to properly plan out your lab days and manage your time. Good time management is invaluable for researchers. For example: Imagine finally getting to the end of your cytofluorescence and you’ve been probing for…
Build A CV You Can Be Proud Of – Part III: Analytical Skills… Including the Dreaded Statistics!
In the previous article in this series, we covered teamwork and networking. Now it’s time to move on to what many people consider the most boring part of the lab work: the analysis. I know we all wish that a simple histogram or a rather nice-looking Western blot or PCR would suffice. But the fact…
Build a CV You Can Be Proud Of – Part II: Teamworking and Networking
Previously, we covered how to add communication skills to our CVs; now it’s time to consider teamwork and networking! In science it can sometimes seem like finding ways to work as part of a team are difficult – after all, how many people does it take to do a Western blot? However, there are ways…
Build a CV You Can Be Proud Of – Part I: Communication Skills
They say scientists are highly skilled… and rightly so! While many people would think that we’re shy, retiring types who sit at our lab benches obsessing over teeny-weeny molecules, science (and particularly the process of obtaining a PhD) sets us up as highly skilled members of the workforce. I can hear you all groaning as…
Troubleshooting Immunohistochemistry
If you read my previous article, you may have given IHC a shot. The chances are if you’re reading this one, it may not have worked. But don’t fret, help is at hand! This article contains a few common pitfalls and problems associated with IHC, and what you can do to try and get the…